Urban Fantasy

[alanajoli]

Between a blog entry of amsaph yesterday and a contest and interview of mdhenry, I've come to a realization. If urban fantasy authors weren't so prolific online and so incredibly friendly to fellow bloggers, I don't think I'd even be reading the genre.

No, seriously.

YA paranormal is sort of a different beast--I've been reading contemporary fantasy in the jfic and the YA sections since I was itty, either with children getting sucked into a fantasy world or having strange things happen to them because they picked up a magic coin. It's not a far stretch from those to books about kids with paranormal abilities, and from there, books with teens whose lives are intersecting with a supernatural world all around them. YA paranormal as a whole has always had a shape--real world kids interacting with crazy paranormal stuff.

Urban fantasy, however, seems to be the heir of a couple of different venues, but a lot of the tropes are born out of the horror genre. As a kid, I never liked horror. I don't like to be scared, and I've never liked scary movies. The word "thriller" tells me I need to avoid the product. But the majority of my reading these days includes zombies and vampires and werewolves--all traditional folk creatures that have run wild in the *horror* genre, and none of which, as creatures, would have encouraged me to pull a book off the shelf as little as three years ago. But when I started following fangs_fur_fey back at the beginning of 2007 (maybe the end of 2006), not only were all of these great writers posting exciting things about using folklore, their writing processes, and just general fun stuff about their lives, they all seemed to be really cool people. And that personal connection is apparently what I needed to really start actively seeking out UF. (And of course now there are the Deadline Dames and the League of Reluctant Adults, which I'm following a little more regularly than FFF these days.)

lyster and I were talking not too long ago about internet presence driving book sales, and I'm coming to acknowledge that I'm the market share--I'm a person who definitively buys books based on my web familiarity with the writers, and I'll even wholeheartedly embrace a genre that wasn't really my thing if as a community, they're really awesome. It's an interesting way to think about what I read.

Comments

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I think I stopped reading it as much when I had to read the comments of the entries to really get to the meat of what was being posted. I love the concept of the questions for the members of FFF, and I completely understand why having each member post an answer as a separate entry would be cumbersome. But I started skipping the entries more when there wasn't something interesting to read right in the entry itself.

A lot of it is just a matter of time, though. As is probably noticeable from my lack of posting the past week, I'm having trouble keeping up with lj in general lately. I shift in and out of how good I am at following blogs, and the organization of group blogs like Deadline Dames and The League make it easy to catch up on the writers I'm most interested in, since they only post once every two weeks or so.

But I haven't really analyzed it, so those are just my off-the-top-of-my-head suspicions about my reading habits. :)